No one knows exactly how many deities there are, anymore than anyone knows how many realms there are. A lot of realms are cut off from the others, with portals only opening on rare occasions and often in random locations. There's enough contact for folks to be sure that some of the "lost" realms still exist, but not to get there reliably.
Pantheons can be almost as long lived as demon-gods. The trick is, whenever members of the pantheon start to go mad, you marginalize them and eventually kick them out or destroy them. By regularly (in a cosmological sense) replacing them with younger, saner deities, you can keep the pantheon as a whole going even if the members keep changing. The downside, of course, is that the gods all know this, and sometimes mad gods are pretty good at hiding their madness, so it's not impossible for a mad deity to end up in charge of a particular pantheon, kicking out the saner members and replacing them with more maleable and/or psychotic deities.
At least one of the current demon-gods should be female, probably a goddess of Love now turned to Hate. For all of them, we should probably know what they used to embody... that'll determine what sort of ruins you can find in their realm, since an insane god generally turns against whatever they used to embody, eventually ending up with its opposite. In theory, a mad god might eventually turn sane again and cycle back to "normality", but in practice it hasn't happened yet.
The utterly insane, isolationist demon-god was once a benevolent god of Knowledge and created the Lendehar as his planesfolk. Over time, he started to torment and destroy them... now the remaining Lendehar in their home realm are mindless things often melted into the environment and surviving solely because their lord won't let them die. Perhaps Lalindiel the Mad? The plane was once a giant temple filled with libraries and gardens... now it's an abandoned ruin. A few people occasionally come here to search for lost treasures, but the Soul Eaters are his angels now and they regularly roam the area looking for prey. It's said that if you can defeat a Soul Eater (a kind of mindless but beautiful angel-looking killing machine that babbles nonsense), it will answer one question (with nearly omnipotent precision) before it dies.
Saying that a deity is "god of X" is about like saying that Einstein was a "god of Physics" and ignoring his other qualities. There's always more to their personalities than that. Many were probably mortal themselves once, long, long ago.
How do mortals become gods? Probably by passing some critical threshold of mana. A pantheon could create a demi-god by each providing a portion of their power to the chosen mortal, after which they could grow into full power on their own.
Posted by Kiz at November 8, 2004 01:30 PMCommentsPost a comment